COLUMN ONE : A Night in the Floating Cities of the Streets : Each night, the cardboard camps spring up. Each morning, they disappear. In these stealth communities, the hard-core homeless resist all attempts to help or roust them.

As the sun slips behind the peaks of Downtown Los Angeles’ skyline, and office workers and shopkeepers begin racing for the freeway, Lewis Parks goes to work, painstakingly raising his tiny roof in a vast shadow city of homelessness.

Three, four, five hours will go by as Parks--known to his sidewalk neighbors on Skid Row as the “Coffin Man”--meticulously stitches together layer upon layer of cardboard to form a sturdy refuge from the elements.

But come dawn, Parks’ creation will be unceremoniously dismantled and carted off to a recycling center by scavengers.

Day in and day out, on main thoroughfares, in side streets and alleys, in parking lots and under storefront awnings, hundreds of homeless men and women observe similar rites of building and breaking down a place to sleep.

Pulling stashes of tents, tarps, cardboard, wood pallets, blankets, sleeping bags, ropes and firewood from the nooks and crannies of the city, the street squatters patch together a network of mini-villages scattered across Downtown.

To follow a dusk-to-dawn cycle on Skid Row sidewalks is to enter a place with its own informal block captains, distinct enclaves and loose cultural mores, a world that flourishes in the darkness, only to vanish--sometimes with a rousting by police--in the morning light.

The fleeting, nocturnal character of the settlements often permits them to cling to their turf and reach an uneasy equilibrium with the forces of commerce and government, despite frequent complaints that they harm business, spread disease and increase crime. They have endured while more established, even sanctioned, encampments--including a city-sponsored camp near the Los Angeles River several years ago--have come and gone after being labeled eyesores, health hazards and simply unmanageable.

Life here can be ugly and dehumanizing: drugs run rampant, people urinate in public and campers live in fear of nighttime attacks.

Still, the camps are multiplying, according to some homeless workers, collecting impoverished free spirits, the mentally ill, drug abusers, alcoholics, prostitutes and predators, many of whom can’t or won’t conform to the rules of missions, hotels and homeless shelters. It is not uncommon for beds in Skid Row shelters to lie empty while squatters crowd nearby street corners.

“There’s no freedom (in the missions and shelters),” complains Duke Miller, a New York transplant who scrounges money recycling bottles. Miller, who has camped on the streets for three years, says he prefers roaming about at night, visiting friends. In homeless programs, “you’ve got to come in when they say. You’ve got to do what they say. I’m a grown man.”

Nighttime sidewalk shantytowns may be the most visible and intractable segment of the homeless problem. And many agree that they pose the greatest challenge to the Clinton Administration and Mayor Richard Riordan, who have pledged a vigorous multimillion-dollar effort to reduce the estimated 80,000 homeless living in the city.

“It’s like a system . . . like a little community,” says Charles King, a manager at Skid Row’s Midnight Mission, which is surrounded by the camps. “(The campers) know what’s expected of them. After they adjust to it, it’s very difficult for them to get out of it.”

*

The well-rehearsed minuet near 4th and Los Angeles streets, a short walk from City Hall, begins in late afternoon. Merchants linger by their shop fronts, watching for the last customers of the day.

And the street campers begin retrieving their materials from cubbyholes and behind dumpsters.

Even before a row of wholesale electronics, gift and perfume shops has begun to close up for the night, stacks of cardboard, plastic and boxes of belongings are piling up on the sidewalk. Like felines at a fishbowl, the street people patiently watch and wait for the first opportunity to pounce--in this case on the coveted space under the awnings protecting the entryways to businesses.

Gradually, often with no words exchanged, the guard changes as shopkeepers pull down their corrugated steel security doors and the campers inch forward. In a slow, seamless exercise, the street people begin shoring up their cardboard walls, draping waterproof sheeting and raising tents.

Shopkeepers complain about the bedraggled tide of people lapping at the door, but seem to grudgingly accept their roles in the daily dance. The encampment sprung up 18 months ago, moving from the Midnight Mission across the street, where a sidewalk sprinkler system was installed to discourage loitering.

This night, a dozen tents and hovels are being assembled along the storefronts--some low, simple cardboard huts; others room-like patchworks of tarps hung from the awnings.

Wayne, a self-described “landlord” of the encampment, takes a prime corner spot under one of the bigger awnings. “When I step into my tent, I’m not on Skid Row,” he says rhapsodically.

Indeed, many campers such as Wayne, who hustles money unloading delivery trucks and feeding parking meters for tips, are proud of their nightly accommodations. It is simply the best lifestyle option available, they say.

“Shelters?” Wayne sniffs in disgust. “That’s like being in jail.”

“I stayed in a hotel for a year,” he goes on. “I’d rather blow the $200 (a month) I’d give those guys.”

*

As dusk blankets the area, another well-rooted encampment is taking shape up the block, on Boyd Street.

Parks, the Coffin Man, is quietly at work, strengthening the walls of the body-size box from which he gets his nickname. “A hurricane could come through here and it wouldn’t disturb him,” says Ernest Baltzgar, arranging a sleeping spot a few feet away.

A bear-like fellow who mumbles vaguely about tax loopholes and “outsiders,” Parks is consumed by his shelter-building. But he has difficulty explaining why he is on the street, why he goes through the same tedious exercise each night, and why he doesn’t use some of the shelter and social services available.

“It’s hard to say right now,” Parks says softly, without looking up from his stitching. “Outsiders . . . it’s a problem.”

Nearby, a slim, graying man who calls himself Magic Johnson is piecing together the wood pallet walls of his quarters--the same one he builds each night, breaks down each morning and stashes in a parking lot.

“Three years in this identical spot. I have a lease that doesn’t expire,” Johnson says. He builds at a leisurely pace, stopping frequently to rest on a small crate and hold forth on the phenomenon of the street encampments.

“Staying outside’s not for everyone,” he says, monitoring the comings and goings on the block. “If you don’t get along, you might get a broken arm. You got to really cross your Ts and dot your I’s.”

There is an ugly side to the nightly encampments. It reveals itself when an oblivious woman on Boyd Street steps between two parked cars, drops her jeans and relieves herself on the asphalt. It shows up in the blank expression of another woman, only half-concealed behind a man holding up a jacket, who is sucking strongly on what appears to be a large pipe.

There is camaraderie. But the drugs, desperation, booze and emotional instability also can be a volatile, dangerous brew. “I go to sleep with knives. I wake up with knives,” says Robin Anderson, who has slept along Los Angeles Street off and on since the late 1980s.

*

By about 11 p.m., the shadow city is in full bloom. And the pulsing center of Skid Row street life has become 5th and Crocker streets, several blocks from Los Angeles and Boyd.

There, an eerie, “Bladerunner”-like scene has developed, as hundreds of ragged men and women mill about, spilling off the sidewalks into the streets. Bonfires burn in three spots. Men are openly passing cash for small packets. In one intersection, a dwarf draped in a robe is dancing about, shaking a cup and apparently soliciting change from people in the cars whizzing by.

Some have nicknamed 5th and Crocker “Homicide.” Johnson calls it “Infinity.” “There is no end to it,” he says. Dozens of street encampments radiate from the intersection along walls, fences and storefronts.

The camps include a fair share of the mentally disabled and people who simply have no resources, homeless activists and city officials note. But there are also those who want to wander, drink, do drugs, party with their neighbors, or slip over to 5th and Crocker. “Peopleout here still like to be free; to do what they want,” explains 55-year-old Alphonzo Carr, a former patient at a Northern California alcohol rehab center who has lived on the sidewalks off and on for 10 years. “On the streets you can do a little more.”

Back on Boyd Street, a small fire has burned out. A 25-cent card game has broken up. The roving cigarette man--15 cents per smoke or two for 25 cents--has made his last rounds.

And customers have tapered off for Johnson’s small business enterprise--refilling disposal lighters that can be used to build fires. Or heat crack cocaine.

Generally, it’s a quiet night, regulars say, partly because many are leery of the reporter and photographer wandering about. Still, a steady stream of people, many with bloodshot eyes and wary stares, wander around well into the night, visiting tents, huddling behind dumpsters, searching for something.

*

At 5 a.m., a light drizzle is falling on Los Angeles Street and a trash truck is making a huge racket emptying a metal dumpster. The roof on Lewis Parks’ box shifts and two grimy tennis shoes drop out. Parks groggily pulls himself out onto the wet sidewalk. “It didn’t leak any,” he reports.

Slowly, the camp pulls itself up off the concrete, nudged by on-schedule arrival of free coffee and doughnuts courtesy of something called “The Church of the Streets” and minister Yeyn Chun. As dozens of street people file by for pastry and a wake-up drink, Chun evangelizes along the line, offering a new pair of socks to those who can shout answers to his Bible quiz. As Chun leaves, one man tries to sell the socks.

Down the street, a cardboard scavenger is pulling apart Parks’ box and tossing the remains in the back of his pickup. Parks watches silently and wanders off into the rousing commercial district. Others are breaking down tents, folding their blankets and tarps. Alphonzo Carr, the Boyd Street veteran, stashes his gear and perches at the corner with a bottle of Old English malt liquor.

The tarps and tents under the row of awnings also are coming down and by the time shopkeepers begin opening up, nearly all the residue of the night before is cleared away. Around the corner, “Jaws”--the unaffectionate name given to the city tractor that patrols each morning--is leveling the remains of a laggard settlement.

No one protests. Everyone knows the routine, even if they don’t understand. “It’s like a cycle that goes around and around and comes back to the same place,” says the manager of a small Boyd Street hotel as he washes the front sidewalk.

The cycle is neither a benign nor acceptable nuisance, some critics say. The nightly street camps appear to be multiplying and increase the risk of spreading diseases such as tuberculosis and AIDS, they say.

“How can you have a healthy, whole city when you have a gangrenous limb?” asks Maxene Johnston, who has worked with the homeless 10 years as president of the Weingart Center.

Riordan will soon announce the latest strategy for dealing with chronic homelessness, part of a bid for up to $25 million in new federal grants. Details are sketchy, but part of the proposal involves funding new, “high-tolerance” 24-hour shelter beds, where rules and regulations would be relaxed. People could come and go anytime “as long as they’re not abusing anyone else’s rights,” Deputy Mayor Rae James says. “But it’s not going to be easy. (And) it’s not likely we’ll be able to take everyone off the streets, everywhere.”

What seems evident is that merely recycling old programs will not reach the deep-rooted street settlements like the one near Los Angeles and Boyd streets. Like a war veteran recounting battles survived, Johnson proclaims that he has “been in just about every program there is. I even was in the missions about two years . . . every program down here is bull----.”